Share this story

Why did small business owner and gamer dad Mike Hoye spend the last few weeks hand-tweaking the text in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker so that the main character was referred to as a girl instead of a boy? As he put it, “I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero.”

Hoye and his three-and-a-half year old daughter Maya have recently been playing Wind Waker together, but Hoye was bothered by the fact that even players who change the protagonist's name to something other than "Link"—which the game allows—always get addressed as though they are male. The main character is always referred to with words like “master,” “my lad,” and “swordsman.” Because Hoye's daughter can't yet read, Hoye has been reading the on-screen dialogue aloud to her and diligently transliterating the gendered language from male to female on the fly as they traverse the game's Great Sea together.

To make this process smoother, Hoye eventually decided to hack away at the actual text of the story, producing a female-oriented version by altering the game's data files. According to his blog post on the project, Hoye took a GameCube disk image (.GCM) of Wind Waker and dug into it with a hex editor. He changed all story text and dialogue by hand, then tested his work by playing the game file in the Dolphin GameCube emulator.

The modifications proved a bit tricky, since the new female-oriented wording had to be a byte-for-byte alteration of the original; even throwing in "she" in place of "he" would mess things up. So Hoye got creative, using words like “milady” in place of “my lad” and “master."

“Sentences need to be changed or reworded just because 'young lady' is one character longer than 'young man,' line breaks need to be in about the right places, that sort of thing,” Hoye told Ars via e-mail.

The gendered storyline that Nintendo gave Wind Waker wasn’t inappropriate; Link is, and always has been, a boy. But if parents want to introduce their daughter to video games, there’s a noticeable shortage of good female main characters to round out the experiences, stories, and situations that unfold. Furthermore, no one should have to deny their daughters a healthy education in the wonders of Zelda because male-oriented text might deal a blow to girls' sense of self-worth.

Would playing Wind Waker as a male protagonist really cause problems for Hoye's daughter? Hoye doesn't know and says he "probably can’t know. I did this because playing through Wind Waker is something my daughter and I like doing together, and because I think Maya deserves to have the game address her as herself. She's not an NPC, and Dad's favorite pastime shouldn't treat girls like second-class citizens.”

Not that such changes are simple. Hoye told Ars that the changes took about “two or three solid days of work, an hour or two at a time over the last few weeks.”

Hoye has made the changes available as a patch to the Wind Waker .GCM file, which must be applied using a tool called "xdelta3," he writes. The modified game needs to be played within the Dolphin emulator, but Hoye speculated to us that it might be possible to burn the game back onto a disc such that it would be compatible with the console again. In any event, Hoye now has a female protagonist for Wind Waker—and you can see the results of his work above.

Promoted Comments

As a male, for the longest time I never but much consideration into these things. When I had my first child, for a while we thought it was going to be a girl (Turned out to be a boy). During that time I started looking at my hobbies and ways to encorperate a girl into them and found how much is overlooked for young girls.

There are almost no female superheroes sutible for a small girl, and of the few there are, there is NO merchandise for. Unless she wants to be a princess there aren't many videogame options for a young girl either.

This is one of those things that once I've seen, I can't unsee it. I notice this gap in almost everything my son gets interested in, and it really bothers me. We own dozens of little superhero squad/ DC universe playschool figures and the only woman I can even find to buy is Catwoman.

Share this story

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston